FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 12, 2026
Berkeley, CA — The Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF) is deeply troubled by the memorandum of understanding announced yesterday between the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Although the administration describes the agreement as an effort to “improve care for the nation’s most vulnerable veterans,” it instead creates a new pathway for taking away disabled veterans’ right to make their own decisions and steering them into guardianships and conservatorships they may not need.
Guardianship and conservatorship are among the most extreme legal interventions that can be imposed on a person. They can strip individuals of the right to make their own medical decisions, control their finances, and direct their own lives. These are not routine protective measures—they are sweeping losses of civil rights that are notoriously difficult to reverse.
The agreement specifically targets veterans who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. But homelessness is a housing crisis—not a justification for court-ordered control.
Most troubling, the agreement authorizes VA attorneys to initiate guardianship proceedings in state courts against veterans—the very people the agency is supposed to serve.
“This administration’s priorities are clear: forced treatment and institutional control,” said Michelle Uzeta, Executive Director of DREDF. “Our nation’s veterans need housing, health care, and community-based services and supports—not a government process designed to strip them of their autonomy.”
This agreement doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The Trump administration has spent the past year systematically dismantling the VA from within. A Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee report documents the wreckage: more than 40,000 VA employees lost in a single fiscal year—the first net staff loss in VA history—including 1,000 physicians, 1,500 schedulers, and 3,000 registered nurses. An estimated 1.2 million veteran patients have lost their VA provider. National wait times for mental health appointments now exceed 35 days—with some facilities reporting waits of over 130 days. The administration gutted the very care and services veterans need, and now proposes guardianship as the answer. That is not a solution.
DREDF calls on Congress to investigate this agreement and rescind it, and urges the administration to reverse course—restore VA staffing, reinstate worker protections, and abandon agreements that treat veterans as problems to be managed rather than people to be served. Disabled veterans deserve support, dignity, and the right to make their own decisions.
Media Contact
Tina Pinedo
Communications & Operations Director
(510) 644-2555 ext. 5226
media@dredf.org
About Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) is a national civil rights law and policy center directed by people with disabilities and parents of children with disabilities. Our mission is to advance the civil and human rights of people with disabilities through legal advocacy, training, education, and public policy and legislative development. We work with the core principles of equality of opportunity, disability accommodation, accessibility, and inclusion.
